We've seen it leaked quite a few times leading up to this official announcement, but today LG did something a bit out of the ordinary by flying us out to Seoul South Korea to launch their first smartphone with Qualcomm's quad core Krait APQ8064 SoC and a host of other features. It's the LG Optimus G, and is based around a 4.7-inch 1280x768 IPS display with in-cell touch from LG Display, and includes either an 8 MP camera with no back bulge or 13 MP camera with a slight bulge. I've put together a table with the LG Optimus G specifications, which are about as beefy as they come these days. The only thing that's missing is a microSD card slot and user replaceable battery. I'm told that LG's emphasis for this design was getting the G as thin as possible, at 8.45mm.

I've been talking for a while now about a host of smartphones coming up based on Qualcomm's Fusion 3 platform, which is to say specifically the combination of APQ8064 AP and MDM9615 baseband. LG's Optimus G looks to be one of the first which will appear sporting that combo, and will be available in Korea this week, followed by the US in October on an aggressive release schedule. There are a couple others, but it's starting to look like the Optimus G might end up being the first in appreciable volume.

LG has talked a lot about how the Optimus G includes some firsts from its own teams, including LG Innotek and LG Display into the 4.7-inch IPS display with in-cell touch, and LG Chem with their new Li-Ion polymer cells that support more cycles and sport the 3.8V nominal chemistry. This is also LG's thinnest smartphone to date, apparently.

We're going to go hands on with the LG Optimus G shortly, but initial suspicions are a design which closely mirrors the LG Optimus LTE2 and previous Prada phones, but in an even thinner form factor and with speedier SoC.